by Karen Cole
‘Gay? Really?’ Rob shakes his head again. ‘It’s always the good-looking ones, isn’t it?’
The microwave pings and when Rob turns to open it Abby takes the opportunity to escape. ‘See you later,’ she calls, and she runs upstairs, locking herself in the bathroom.
The test is simple, though it feels undignified squatting over the toilet and peeing on a small, plastic stick. Abby doesn’t have to wait long for the results. Just two minutes. While she’s waiting, she slumps against the bath, staring at the tangle of spiders’ webs and dead flies under the sink. Ellie refuses to let Rob or Abby kill spiders.
‘They have as much right as we do to be here,’ she said a couple of months ago, during an argument with Rob.
‘Well, not really,’ Rob said. ‘They don’t pay the mortgage, do they?’
Abby had been unable to shake the feeling that they were really arguing about her.
She sighs and picks up the stick. A small but definite blue line has appeared in the control window.
And a plus sign in the result window.
A positive result.
It must be a mistake. She reads the instructions through again, trying not to panic. But she’s done everything right.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit,’ she says, fumbling with a second test packet, and she repeats the test, warm wee splashing on her hand. After another two minutes, the results are back.
She’s pregnant.
Two
It makes no sense. Abby looks down at her belly. There’s a red pattern etched on her pale skin from trousers that are too tight and a tiny puncture mark from the belly-button ring she no longer wears, but otherwise nothing. It’s as flat as ever. There’s no sign of anything stirring under the surface.
The test claims to be 99 per cent accurate. A one-in-a-hundred chance the first test was wrong. But for both tests to be wrong . . . What are the odds?
She reads the section about medical conditions and medicines that could affect the result, but there’s nothing that could conceivably apply to her. There’s no escaping it. She must be pregnant. She sits down on the toilet seat with her head in her hands, reeling with shock. This can’t be happening, she thinks. Please God, let this not be happening. How will she even begin to cope? She can barely take care of herself. The thought of having a small baby completely dependent on her is terrifying. And what will she do about her job? She can all too easily imagine the head’s reaction when she tells her she needs to take time off to have a baby so soon after starting at Elmgrove.
Downstairs, the front door slams. It’s Ellie arriving home, talking to Hector, murmuring something indistinct to Rob in the kitchen. Seconds later she hears her come thudding up the stairs.
Shit. Abby stuffs the tests back in the bag, ties it tightly and shoves it in the bin, covering it with scrunched-up toilet paper.
She waits for the sound of Ellie’s bedroom door closing, then creeps across the landing to her room.
Lying on her unmade bed, Abby stares up at the blue ceiling with its fluffy white clouds. She painted them up there herself two years ago, when Ellie and Rob were still planning to use the room as a nursery. She remembers standing on the ladder painting up high, while a heavily pregnant Ellie painted the skirting boards. Abby blinks back tears at a sudden vision of her sister, rosy and happy, a smudge of magnolia paint on her cheek, struggling to reach down over her swollen belly.
‘Our little miracle,’ Ellie had called it.
They’d been trying for years to have a baby. They’d almost given up on the idea of conceiving naturally and were considering IVF when boom, just like that, she fell pregnant.
‘She’s going to be a black belt in karate, this one,’ Ellie said during a break in painting.
They were sitting together on the bare floorboards, drinking milky tea. Abby put her hand on Ellie’s belly and felt the taut skin judder as her niece tested her new limbs.
But Ellie’s baby didn’t become a black belt in karate. She never became anything. She kicked and wriggled so much in Ellie’s womb that the umbilical cord wrapped itself around her neck and strangled her.
Abby sits up and wraps her arms around her knees, remembering those terrible months after Ellie lost the baby. Abby was still living in London at the time, but she came as often as she could to visit. And on her visits, she was deeply shaken by the change in her sister. For days on end Ellie just sat in bed staring into space, refusing to speak or eat. Ellie had always been so full of life and energy – always helping people, always with some cause to fight for. But when her baby died it was as if all that furious energy had been sucked inward somehow, like a star imploding. And it was awful to witness.
It’s a cruel irony, Abby thinks, that Ellie who wants a baby so badly, who would make such a great mother, can’t have one, and that she, Abby, who can’t even so much as keep a plant alive, is pregnant. It makes no sense.
Unless . . . She sits up and switches on her laptop, types in ‘What is the longest pregnancy on record?’
According to the internet, someone called Beulah Hunter gave birth in 1945, after a 375-day pregnancy. But even if the story is true, it still wouldn’t make sense. She last had sex over a year ago and, according to Dr Rowe, she is only two months pregnant. Abby trawls the internet some more, getting distracted by some grim stories about stone babies, a rare condition where the foetus dies and calcifies inside the mother. She reads, horrified and fascinated, about how, sometimes, the baby can stay in the womb for years. There’s a picture of a wrinkled Moroccan woman with a distended stomach and the stone baby she carried inside her for forty-six years.
Abby’s stomach curdles, and she rushes to the bathroom, throwing up in the toilet bowl.
‘Are you okay, Abs?’
Ellie’s there, standing just outside the open door. She looks tired and anxious, her work suit creased, dark rings around her eyes and blonde hair scraped up in a messy bun.
Abby wipes her lips and flushes the toilet. Ellie is nine years older and has always been like a second mother to her. She normally tells Ellie everything. But this is different. She can’t tell her this. It will only stir up all that pain and grief that Abby knows still lurks dangerously near the surface.
‘I’m fine,’ she says, standing up and offering a weary smile. ‘Just a stomach bug.’
‘You should go see Simon. Or if you want, I could examine you.’
‘I saw him today, actually.’ Abby washes her hands in the sink, watching the water get sucked down the plughole.
‘You did?’ Ellie frowns. ‘What did he say?’
‘Like I said, it’s a stomach bug.’
‘Why don’t you take some time off work? They’d understand. I’m sure Rob could explain.’
‘Rob could explain what?’ Rob appears at the top of the stairs. Now they are both looking at her, blocking her exit. Ellie with her anxious, blue eyes, and Rob with the superior, comical expression he reserves for his students and, with irritating frequency, Abby too.
‘Jesus. Can’t a girl get a little privacy?’ Abby explodes in frustration. She pushes past then towards the stairs. ‘Does everyone want to come and watch me throw up? Maybe I should sell tickets?’
‘Abby was sick again,’ says Ellie. ‘She’s overdoing it. Don’t you think she should take some time off, Rob?’
Abby sighs angrily. ‘I’m fine. I don’t need time off, I just need some fresh air. I’m going to take Hector for a walk.’
*
The rain has stopped but the air is still damp, and the trees and shrubs are dripping. Abby strides along, Hector trotting along beside her, towards the old Abbey grounds.
Hector strains at the lead as they reach the park gates. Abby lets him off and he bounds away up the path round the lake. She follows, walking rapidly, as if she can shake off Rob and Ellie, as if she can shake off the questions and doubts crowding in
her head. How can she be pregnant? If not Ben, then who? And when? How the hell has she got herself into this mess?
Abby follows the path over the bridge to the other side of the lake and sits on a damp bench looking at the dark, wind-ruffled water. The park is empty, the sun sinking behind the church and the trees. The shadows are growing, swallowing up the park and creeping over the newly mown grass. A swan glides by silently, its eyes cold and black. Abby shivers, batting away a sudden sense of unease. Something is very wrong.
She’s walking back past the bandstand when it hits her. And suddenly it seems so obvious. Why hasn’t she thought of it before? According to Dr Rowe, she’s about two months pregnant. Two months ago was the beginning of January. Abby reaches the park gates and calls Hector, putting him back on the lead. Of course, that’s it. It must be.
New Year’s Eve.
Three
‘Danny, you know your New Year’s party? You remember how drunk I was?’
It’s Friday afternoon, almost the end of the school week, and everyone else has buggered off to afternoon classes. Abby and Danny are the only people left in the staff room at Elmgrove Comprehensive, sitting in sagging armchairs and sipping cold coffee. They are done with classes for the day but Danny likes to stay late and get all his marking done on a Friday so that he can enjoy his weekend without having to think about work, and Abby is in no rush to get home. Gina, the head teacher, has left a box of chocolates on the table, and Abby is munching her way through them distractedly.
Danny’s dark eyes crinkle in amusement. ‘You certainly were the life and soul of the party, flirting for England, if I remember rightly.’
Abby cringes inwardly. ‘Was I flirting with anyone, in particular?’
Danny raises his eyebrows. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Not really.’
She remembers arriving, feeling shy and hopelessly out of place amongst Danny’s rich university friends, and she remembers that, encouraged by Danny’s flatmate Mark, she tried boosting her confidence by downing several tequilas in quick succession. But after that, large parts of the evening are blank. She can only recall short fragments, like in a dream: sitting on the stairs; talking to a guy in a green T-shirt; then, later, lying on stiff, frosty grass gazing at the fireworks exploding in the sky; and then there’s an image of a bottle shattering against a wall, shards of glass flying. Bizarre. Someone must have given her a lift home because she remembers waiting in a car at a garage forecourt, the headlights gleaming on the wet tarmac. Then nothing. Nothing until she woke up alone in her own bed with a massive hangover.
She woke up alone. She’s sure about that.
‘Someone gave me a lift home. Do you know who? Did you see who I left with?’
Danny shrugs. ‘I was a bit preoccupied myself. Why do you want to know?’
She lowers her voice, even though there’s no one else in the room.
‘It turns out the doctor was right.’
Danny stares. His mouth falls open in astonishment. ‘You mean . . . ?’
‘I’m pregnant.’ Saying it aloud makes it feel real. Abby feels dizzy and the room sways as if she’s about to faint.
‘But I thought you said . . .’
‘. . . that I hadn’t slept with anyone – I know.’ Abby cuts him off impatiently. ‘But I must have, mustn’t I?’
Danny shakes his head, smiling. ‘That’s generally the way it works.’
‘I think it must have happened . . . at your party. It’s the only logical explanation. The problem is . . . I just don’t know . . . who . . .’
Danny chews his nails, lost in thought. A worried crease appears in his forehead. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘What do you mean?’ Abby asks, confused.
‘Think about it, Abs. You were out of your head. What kind of guy has sex with someone when they’re almost unconscious? I mean it’s practically rape.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’ Abby feels sick at the thought, but at the same time strangely relieved. All day she’s been blaming herself. Perhaps none of this is her fault, after all.
‘Do you think I should go to the police?’
‘And say what? You got drunk at a party and someone slept with you? Even if you knew who it was, it would be impossible to prove that you weren’t in a fit state to consent, unless someone actually saw it happen. But I don’t think you should worry.’ He smiles. ‘I’m probably being a drama queen as usual. Just ignore me. It’s way more likely that it’s a simple case of two people getting drunk and sleeping together.’
Abby nods. He’s right, of course. She puts her head in her hands.
‘Oh God, what a mess,’ she groans, as tears well up in her eyes. ‘What an idiot I am.’
Danny puts an arm around her shoulder. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ he says soothingly. ‘I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve woken up regretting the things I’ve done the night before.’
Abby nods and wipes her nose. ‘Yeah, but you didn’t end up pregnant, did you?’
‘That’s true. I’m sorry, Abs.’ Danny gives her a lopsided smile. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she shakes her head as she meets his eyes. ‘I really don’t know.’
*
‘There’s a parcel for you in your pigeonhole,’ Jenny, the school secretary, calls as Abby passes reception on her way out of the building a couple of hours later. Jenny doesn’t look up from the document she’s typing, her pink, varnished nails tapping furiously at the keyboard.
‘Okay, thanks. Have you seen Rob?’ Abby asks.
‘He left already.’
Abby empties her pigeonhole. There’s a payslip, a circular from the head about raising standards, which she chucks straight in the bin, and a small, brown parcel. It has her name on it in block capitals but nothing else. She stuffs it into her bag along with the pay slip. She’ll open it at home.
Danny stays to finish his marking, so she walks home alone. Trudging in the drizzle down the dual carriageway, Danny’s earlier question reverberates in her head. It’s a good question. What the hell is she going to do?
A car whizzes past, spraying rainwater and soaking her dress.
Shit.
Could Danny have been right in the first place? Was she out of it at the time it happened? Abby’s disgust at the thought is physical; it coils deep in her belly, snaking its way up her chest into her oesophagus. She doubles over and retches onto the pavement. Tears sting her eyes as she walks on. The worst of it is, she’s allowed it to happen. She put herself in that situation and now she’s pregnant. The question is: what’s she going to do about it?
There’s only really one option.
*
At home, Abby holes herself up in her bedroom with her phone and googles ‘abortion clinics’. She writes down the number of a couple. Then she looks at her Facebook feed. There’s a picture of Chloe and Ben with their arms entwined on the beach in Thailand. Chloe looks tanned and beautiful without make-up. Ben is looking at her adoringly.
Ben and Chloe. Her boyfriend and her best friend. The ultimate betrayal. They’d all hung out together at art college. Ben had always seemed happy to have Chloe around.
Perhaps too happy, she had realized with hindsight.
When she left to do her PGCE, and Chloe and Ben stayed on in London, sharing the same flat, she didn’t think anything of it. She isn’t quite sure when she first realized there was something going on between them. It was more of a gradual realization, an accumulation of small signs she tried to ignore. She cringes with embarrassment remembering the showdown when Ben finally admitted he was sleeping with Chloe – the way she stormed around his room, tipping over furniture and emptying his wardrobe, flinging his clothes out onto the street.
She stares at the post, wondering why she tortures herself with this. She could
just unfriend them. But maybe it’s like a dog licking its wounds. Return often enough to the injury, and eventually it heals. She sighs and closes the window. She has other things to worry about now anyway. She opens another window and types in ‘pregnancy eight weeks’.
Your baby now weighs approximately one ounce, she reads. Its head is more erect, and the neck is becoming stronger. Its heart begins to separate into four chambers and an ultra-fine, soft hair called lanugo will begin to appear on the skin.
There’s a picture of an embryo – a strange, hunched-up creature with a tail like a sea horse. Its hand is up by its eye as if it’s crying.
Oh God, she thinks. This is real. She turns off her phone and curls up on the bed. She wants to pretend this isn’t happening – to burrow under the duvet and hide. But how can you hide from something inside you?
It’s only later, after tea, that she remembers the parcel. She fetches it from her bag and takes it into the kitchen. The dishwasher’s humming, and the TV is blaring out the theme tune from Game of Thrones in the living room where Rob and Ellie are watching. Abby gets the kitchen scissors to cut the Sellotape. She can’t imagine what it could be; possibly some stupid teaching aid from the head teacher, or maybe a present from a pupil. It must have been hand delivered. There’s no postmark, no address. She tears at the brown paper and something white and soft falls out. She picks it up and her breath catches in her throat.
What the hell?
It’s a babygrow with a yellow duck on the front. The duck is wearing red wellingtons and splashing in a puddle, winking cheekily.
Abby’s hands are shaking as she scrabbles inside the discarded brown paper and finds a simple white card. On the card, typed in capitals it says:
TO ABIGAIL,
FOR BABY,
WITH LOVE.
Four
